For Your Amusement

For your amusement I will document a conversation about twelve months ago with an educated man, about my age, recently moved (like me) to Bonavista:-

(looking up from his sixth appendage (Android smart phone): he said "SIX HUNDRED COVID DEATHS IN THE UK TODAY" (It was a Sunday afternoon). A look of alarm spread across his face. He looked up at me to check that I am hurrying to tie a noose and hang myself.

Chris: "Oh. What is a typical number for deaths in the UK?"

My pal uses his stock answer to any question: "I have no idea", which I believe is the sign of a lazy brain.

Chris: "Well, what is the population of the UK?"

"I have no idea".

Chris: "50 million" (I knew that this was in the ballpark, but I wanted something I could divide seven into and "49" was probably too difficult for Tom)

So?

Chris: Well, suppose on average that people live to seventy and then croak; that suggests that in any one year, one seventieth of the population die; so what is one seventieth of 50 million?

"I have no idea".

Chris: Well, say 49,000,000 divided by 70.

(pause)

Chris: That's about 700,000, and say 350 days in a year, so about 2,000 deaths per day; across the UK

(pause)

Chris: I think that that is reasonable; if I were an eagle soaring over the green fields, I might see two thousand hearses trundling along those myriad country lanes on any one day. So of those 600 COVID deaths, how many were old, vulnerable people who were about to die this year anyway? Those with emphysema, lung transplants, scheduled for surgery etc?

I was trying to get my pal to think that perhaps 600 deaths attributed to COVID might be not much more than the regular daily figure of people in a specific category (“old”) who were due to shuffle off anyway. True, a few accelerated departures, but scheduled departures at any rate.

Like the idiot I am I tried the same tactics a few months later when "SIX PEOPLE IN THE UK DIED OF BLOOD CLOTS AFTER GETTING THE ASTRA-ZENECA VACCINE"

I pointed out that we are all going to die after receiving the COVID vaccine, only the question of WHEN was unresolved, and a weasel word like "after" was meaningless.

Later I dug up "death in vehicular collision" and "death by blood clot after COVID vaccination", same political area (USA), calculated the probabilities of each (not a terribly accurate figure, I confess, but at least a figure), and then calculated the ratio of those two probabilities. Turns out you are three thousand times more likely to die in a vehicular collision than from a blood-clot-after-COVID-vaccine death, even with that weasel word "after".

I started to try to calculate the probability of death due to stress of driving to/from a vaccination resulting in distraction and a regular collision that would of course NOT be attributed to COVID - but it was way past my bedtime so I went to bed instead.

My point in all of this is that The Great Unwashed Public are now so well-trained to take data from news media/web and treat it as information that all hope for this world is lost. I am in damn good health for a 75 year old who spent twenty years trying to drink and smoke himself to death, but I think I have joined the ranks of those who, when it is time to go, will sigh and say "I am glad to be leaving this decrepit world"!

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